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YokimaSun writes to point out a Kickstarter project that may warm the cockles of your heart: "Fans of emulation and homebrew have not had much to cheer about over the years; the recent generation of consoles has pretty much killed off any hacking by constant firmware updates. The days of PSP homebrew have died a death and consoles like the Caanoo, GP2x and even the mighty Openpandora never really lived up to the massive expectation. There is a glimmer of hope from a team of homebrew developers who have developed a new console called the GCW-Zero, a new open source handheld system which uses the OpenDingux Linux OS. The specs are impressive, with a Ingenic JZ4770 1 GHz MIPS processor, Vivante GC860, capable of OpenGL ES 2.0, 3.5 inch LCD with 320x240 pixels; 4:3 aspect ratio, 512 MB DDR2 and 16GB of internal memory which can via external memory card be extended by another 32GB. N64 and PS1 emulation and everything below should be at full speed in time."

The specs are impressive, with a Ingenic JZ4770 1 GHz MIPS processor, Vivante GC860, capable of OpenGL ES 2.0, 3.5 inch LCD with 320x240 pixels; 4:3 aspect ratio, 512 MB DDR2 and 16GB of internal memory which can via external memory card be extended by another 32GB. N64 and PS1 emulation and everything below should be at full speed in time."

No, that is not impressive. Super lo-res screen, slower than any phone that is available today. But it's open source, so I suppose that's good.

But what is the point? Learning? Because the thing won't sell, like the previous models didn't do. You can have the best hardware, but if you don't have games for the device it doesn't matter.

I, for one, would rather game on my phone which is faster and has a much higher resolution display, with a bluetooth connected game controller of my choice.

My guess is that they are going after people who want to run emulators for old game systems. I'd pay good money for a hand held SNES emulator. I know there are Android apps to do it, but I can't imagine how you would handle the controls.

Yeah, and if I wanted an out of date phone, I'd get it.:-) I use my phone to much for non-gaming to get a gaming phone. I want something that does well at both. I'd even pay for a separate controller for my phone, but it would have to be compatible without rooting.

It breaks down like this: it's legal to buy it, it's legal to own it, and, if you're the proprietor of a gaming company, it's legal to sell it. It's legal to carry it, but that doesn't really matter 'cause -- get a load of this -- if you get stopped by the cops in Amsterdam, it's illegal for them to search you. I mean, that's a right the cops in Amsterdam don't have.

My phone is a flip phone. An Android phone would involve a much higher recurring fee. For example, Virgin Mobile USA won't activate an Android phone on a $80 per year dumbphone plan; it requires a $420 per year smartphone plan. I imagine a lot of children and teens are in the same situation: parents are willing to pay for a low-end plan to call home in an urgency but not more than that.

with a bluetooth connected game controller of my choice.

Provided that Android system updates don't cause your Bluetooth controller driver to fail with "No route to host", as they

True, one can buy a new smartphone at MSRP and a new gamepad and forfeit accumulated service credit when switching to a new carrier, or one can stay on his existing phone and carrier and buy a dedicated gaming device with a built-in gamepad. I imagine that the latter is among the use cases for which this product is intended.

Top-ups (money added to a customer's account) on Virgin Mobile USA carry over from month to month. As long as at least $20 was added in the past 90 days, the customer can make and receive voice calls and send and receive text messages. Otherwise, the customer forfeits the entire account balance to the carrier on the 150th day after the date of the last top-up. I'm not sure, but I think the balance is also forfeited when the number is ported to another carrier. And I imagine that other pay-as-you-go carriers

I'm one of the people working on this console. The point of it is retro gaming: emulation, classic PC games and homebrew and indie games in retro style. Touch screens and physical controls are completely types of input: you cannot play a game designed for physical input well with a touch screen or vice versa.

We've got a light embedded Linux distro on it and with C/C++ applications writing directly into the framebuffer (set up via SDL, usually) you can get very decent performance from these specs. For example, my prototype has 256 MB of memory and 240 MB of that is available for applications. Similarly, the OS footprint on the internal storage is less than 100 MB.

Not running Android has its advantages too: porting existing C/C++ applications to Android is quite a hassle, while porting to the Zero is often a cross compile followed by customizing the key mapping. Also we have fewer layers between the application and the hardware, resulting in lower latency. Maybe it's technically possible to get low latency on Android, but in practice a lot of devices suffer from input or audio latency.

You can't. Android has a re-implementation of libc, which is missing some things you'd expect. Like any of the normal IPC mechanisms. If you want to port GNU to Andoird, you have to bring your own libc with you.

You can't. Android has a re-implementation of libc, which is missing some things you'd expect. Like any of the normal IPC mechanisms. If you want to port GNU to Andoird, you have to bring your own libc with you.

Luckily, that is very doable. A handful of.so files, and programs compiled against GNU's libc run just fine. But, a more substantial hurdle might be some of the tweaks to the Linux kernel that Android introduces. Shouldn't be a problem for mainstream applications, but I'm sure there are corner cases where the kernel support just isn't there.

Ubuntu was demoing an Android port [ubuntu.com] at CES this year, which sounds as though it runs in something like a chroot jail. The idea seems to be to hook your phone up to a monitor to display Linux apps, but it seems at least conceivable that they could display on the phone's screen if you could get around the usability issues.

So you want to emulate the SNES and chose a screen with an even lower resolution than this 20 years old console. You wouldn't even be able to play Amiga PAL games on this, or show border sprites on the C64 emulation without ugly scaling. I mean, wtf? Who is this for?

It's super-low res because it's supposed to run legacy games. Your PS1 / N64 output at 320x240 typically, with capability of 640x480 "high resolution" at a push. Furthermore, your phone does more than play games, yet plays games well; The processor isn't dedicated to gameplay on your phone, so a dedicated game console doesn't need as much horsepower. Thirdly, the games are already available; IT RUNS EMULATOR ROMS.

If something is advertised as running ROMs, what will the console makers say? I'm not a lawyer, but I see potential for a lawsuit on grounds of "inducing infringement" (MGM v. Grokster) unless the manufacturer makes a point of advertising it for use with the Retrode [retrode.org] or similar copier, which opens up a defense under 17 USC 117(a)(1):

It is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided that such

Obviously this isn't meant to play unlicensed copies of games for other consoles. I'm simply stating, as the stub does, that the specifications of the hardware are in line with those of two generations of console for which emulators are available, and those emulators will run at full speed (WRT to the console) on this hardware. There's nothing wrong with that!

And that's why this device should have a 640x480 display. That's not even high-res any more. 320x240 is for cheap crap mirrors with a display for a backup camera, not a handheld gaming platform. The real problem comes when you're dealing with a low-res source near the panel's resolution. Either you can have black bars or you can use a very expensive scaling algorithm and still have it look pretty bad or you can use a cheap scaling algorithm and have it look like dogshit.

People who do gaming have widescreen TV's and monitors now. The days of teenagers gaming on tiny screens are over now. If they are looking at tiny screens its because they're busy cyberbullying their peers,not gaming. Too little too late.

People who do gaming have widescreen TV's and monitors now. The days of teenagers gaming on tiny screens are over now. If they are looking at tiny screens its because they're busy cyberbullying their peers,not gaming. Too little too late.

No, they're playing games on their phones with ever-larger (5"/6"+) screens. Hell, even a 3.5" screen is considered "tiny" (which is why Apple had to go 4" on the iPhone 5, and even people consider that too damn small).

The big challenge for the developers will be creating a device that's small, runs well, runs for a long time, and is cheap. The current handheld console companies - who set people's expectations of the technology - use economies of scale to push cost down, and often rely on hacker-unfriendly industrial design to cram components into the smallest possible space. They'll have to find a way to get around those limitations. And that's before you consider smartphones, which have set a ludicrously short life cycl

The problem with a home-brew or emulation-only game system is that the hardware is now easier than the software. We're now well into the age of mobile devices. The hardware here is basically a smartphone with a lower-resolution screen and slightly different processor. (Although the screen choice seems like a bad idea: 320x240 is just too low.)

The hard part is getting developers to write native games for it. Good luck with that in this day and age unless you're Sony or Microsoft and can spend millions on woo

Games for GP2X and the like are already written for SDL, Allegro, and the like. Porting them to use a particular platform's screen size, audio output frequency, and button layout is likely a couple days' work at most.

As someone who doesn't want his retro gaming graphics stretched or blurred, I would prefer my 256x224 SNES games showing up matted on a 320x240 screen so there's a 1:1 pixel representation. 640x480 offers nothing for even Playstation, which maxes out around 320x240.

I posted a question on their kickstarter, asking what they would do to avoid being another OpenPandora fiasco (four years later, first-day pre-orderers are still without hardware and being asked to stump up again for the device to be delivered and refund requests ignored), what sort of experience they have in the area, what sort of business acumen and supplier management they have in the project, etc.

i.e. I trust you can BUILD the device, how are you going to buy the parts, pay someone to put it together, d

The devices are built in China by a factory who have done this sort of thing before. I don't know all the details, but while the yield of the first batch wasn't great, it also wasn't worse than what one would expect from a first production run. Justin has been a reseller of devices like the Dingoo A320 for several years, so he has practical experience in distribution.

Regarding the software, we build the root file system using buildroot [buildroot.org] with as few customizations as needed. Our SDL is using the Linux framebuffer for graphics and ALSA for audio, no acceleration is implemented but it's not necessary either: pushing pixels at 320x240 or synthesizing stereo audio at 44.1 or 48 kHz can easily be done by the CPU.

We do want to add acceleration for OpenGL ES. We're working to get the proprietary driver from Vivante up and running in our system (this wasn't trivial because we're using uClibc instead of glibc). We're also looking at the open source etna_viv [github.com] project, but that's in an early stage of development, so it will be a while before it is usable as a full driver replacement. Note that the GPU renders from memory to memory; the framebuffer is handled by the LCD controller and that part is already fully open source, so if you want a fully open kernel you can run SDL applications just fine today.

All sources can be found on github [github.com]. This includes the kernel, buildroot, the boot loader, the image generation tools and more.

You can post a comment in the comments section, and point people at it, or add an FAQ.

Fact is, the person answering the Kickstarter queries isn't doing them favours with those sorts of responses (this answer is better - still not perfect, but better).

mth - I don't know if you know the history of the OpenPandora project, which I referenced in my question, but your answer just rings too many bells for me. Chinese production (with people uncertain or not giving details on how that's going on the kickstarter),

Funny, I thought this console was supposed to emulate consoles from 1980 up to 1999, I thought the 320x240 display was a perfect match. I do wonder if it's powerful enough to run Neo Geo games at full speed, however.

The only reason this might be interesting is if its very cheap, I don't see a price listed anywhere. Why do people insist on re-inventing the wheel when it comes to portable consoles. I keep hearing of some ARM/MIPS-Linux hand held that turns out to be vaporware or bombs. Who is going to carry a 1ghz, 512MB 320x240 Linux console when their phone already has a quad-core ARM, 1-2GB RAM, gigabytes of storage and a high rez screen? Just because its open source doesn't mean much at all unless it can compete with

I have a 3DS now. I don't take it everywhere with me. I mostly play it at home. But if I could get a device that could do Atari-PS1, I already own a fairly large game library in that range. And the resolution of the screen is a close to perfect match. I'm the type that would rather play SNES games matted to 256x224 on the 320x240 screen just to have 1:1 pixel representation. All the way through N64 and PS1 there's not much gain in having any

A majority of the games on PS1 are 320x240, however, there are a significant minority of games that use more than that. Some of these are pretty popular titles. I know that tekken 3 at least uses 320x480.

With Android, you have to make sure the device where you run emulators supports physical buttons. Android 4.2 broke Bluetooth gamepads on my Nexus 7, and very few Android devices have an internal gamepad: pretty much the Xperia Play phone, the JXD S5100 [liliputing.com] and S5110 pocket tablets, and the forthcoming Archos GamePad tablet. On-screen gamepads have their own problems [pineight.com], as any player of fast action games in DroidEmuLite will tell you. This sort of limits the game genres that are viable on Android.

I am aware that I am an edge case, and edge cases are less profitable for mass producers than the mass market. The majority of end users are not similarly experienced enough to know when they can safely run an unpatched system, and they would be seriously inconvenienced if their paid games would stop working after a security update. When I mention drawbacks of something, should I phrase them as affecting "me" or should I phrase them as affecting "people"?

You not only have a driver so you can run a Bluetooth controller on your tablet, but, as implied by your other posts, you BOUGHT an app to add that support.

It's the best specced product in its class. Yes, it might be less powerful than an android tablet from 2 years ago. But that android tablet doesn't have gaming controls. This is for people who liked the Dingoo A320, but want something better. This is for people who wanted a Pandora, but couldn't afford one. This is for people who would rather replay Master of Magic on the go than whatever Nintendo or Sony are hyping today.

OK, first of all pretty much any sliding Android phone has "gaming controls", even if they're labeled with letters like "Q", "W", "E"... etc..

Secondly, if a two year old Android phone can have a decent screen, why can't this? Even if you accept the premise that Android phones don't generally come with an explicit D-pad, it's not as if the designers had to make some stomach-churning trade off decision - shall we include a decent screen, or add a dedicated D-pad? Because, like, it's one or the other.

Don't forget that the PSP has two MIPS CPUs, each with its own floating point processor.And a 480x272 resolution, which it will be kind of hard to emulate on a 320x240 display.

The list of failed handheld gaming consoles is long. The list of successful open source one is empty. There's no way you're going to build a momentum, unless you are way ahead of the market leaders. And without a momentum, it'll die before it takes off.

Donate money to this, and you'll either get nothing, or another box that goes in the closet/basement/attic. Perhaps you'll get your money back after 20 years if you keep it in mint condition.

I would love to buy Jeff Minter games, but he doesn't publish them on any acceptable platform. Paying the Apple tax for a device I don't fully control is a complete deal breaker. If Yak wants my money, he can publish on a decent platform. Say, the C64.

Jeff Minter is one of the few people I buy the games of whether I intend to play them or not. He can do more in kilobytes than most of today's programmers can do in megabytes, and is a rather nice guy too.

Remember, everything from ps1 and N64 (and below) were made to run on a tv.

True, most PlayStation and Nintendo 64 games run at 240p (LDTV). But there are some that run at 480i (SDTV), such as Tobal No. 1 and Ehrgeiz. There are even a couple Genesis games that run at 480i, namely the multiplayer of Sonic 2. The Super NES was capable of 480i, but I don't know if any games used it.

An HD-screen wouldn't make a difference here

But a full SD screen will.

If you're into (real) retro-games and MAME

What MAME calls a "standard resolution" monitor is essentially an SDTV with component in. Most games run at 240p, but several run at 480i. I seem to remember the menus of Dance Dan

The Super NES was capable of 480i, but I don't know if any games used it.

Off the top of my head, Seiken Densetsu 3 used the SNES's high-res 512x384 mode. In fact, the game is effectively unplayable at lower resolutions; it used the high resolution to render complex kanji that were unreadable at lower resolutions.

Get classic OpenPandora preorders fulfilled? Um, no, not at all. My guess is they've fulfilled considerably less than 1/2.

The devs state they don't have funds to fulfill orders, and that they're using new revenue to help fulfill the massive backlog they presently cannot afford.

I was in fairly early in the queue, early December `08. I've listened to hopeful progress report after hopeful progress report, but I'm skeptical I'll ever see a thing from the $330 I mail ordered them. If OpenPandora disclosed any in

Short version: Dingux is Dingoo Linux and OpenDingux is a reimplementation of Dingux.

The project originates from the scene formed around the Dingoo A320 [wikipedia.org]. Ignacio García Pérez (aka booboo) ported Linux to this device and called that Dingux. Dingux worked great, but it was a one-man project and Ignacio didn't have time to keep supporting it. The code was based on the Linux kernel released by Ingenic (the manufacturer of the JZ4740 SoC), who often invent their own kernel interfaces instead of stickin

Do you not know what the OpenPandora was? Same thing, but stemming from the GP2X, really, and even the Dingoo in part.

The units exists but in terms of actually delivering, I doubt they qualify as having done that well. First day pre-orderers from four years ago still have no units (well, they can get one, if they pay hundreds of dollars again to someone else now). The software available is all pretty much OS stuff recompiled. In four years, they never really got to the sort of stability and popularity o

And, if anything, ED, you're the only person I would have trusted on OpenPandora anyway. But the fact remains that the project as a whole has suffered serious setbacks in its customer relations, not all due to volcanoes and rogue companies.

Personally, I'd have distanced myself from the whole thing years ago if I were you. I still don't quite get why you do anything at all in that way - there can't be much profit in it for you any more.

But, early customers, investors, community people - quite a lot of peo

I'd love to be helping to polish and work on Pandora, AnonymousCoward, but after placing an order two months in, early December 08, I have no hardware and little hope.

OpenPandora has not disclosed how many units have made it out into the field.OpenPandora has not told us anything about the current rate of fulfillment for backlogged units.OpenPandora claims to be out of funds.OpenPandora claim to be using new sales to fund the backlog.

But we've been strung along for four years already, and I'd be shocked if